Will Geary’s TransitFlow project is an experimental set of tools to build animated transit flow visualizations, built from Transitland’s open-source transit schedule data. More than a dozen visualizations are available in video form here; each shows the flow of trains, buses and other forms of transport over the course of a day. Very high visual appeal. More at the Guardian. [Metrocosm]
Tag: data visualizations
National Geographic Infographics
Speaking of National Geographic. If the magazine is known for its cartography and its photography, one should not forget the illustrations, charts and infographics that accompany many of the articles and appear on the back of every folded map that comes several times a year with a magazine subscription. Now there’s a book of them: National Geographic Infographics. Edited by Julius Wiedemann and published by Taschen, the book “gather[s] the magazine’s best infographics of the past 128 years.” More at Atlas Obscura and Wired.
A Map of Global Shipping
This interactive map shows the location of every single cargo ship over the course of 2012. Shipping routes (the Straits of Malacca look particularly bottlenecked) and materials shipped are available via the interface, and there’s a nice narrated tutorial explaining how the map works. Thanks to David Krathwohl for the tip. [Digg]
Previously: Live Marine Traffic Maps; ESA Maps European Shipping Routes.
Brexit: A Story in Maps
Dissatisfied with the maps of the EU referendum results he encontered, Bob Taylor crunched the numbers and produced some interesting maps of his own, including choropleth maps, cartograms, and maps identifying clusters of support for leave and remain. [Yanko Tsvetkov]
Indian Railways Reachability Map
Sajjad Anwar and Sanjay Bhangar have been playing with train, station and schedule data from Indian Railways, one result of which (so far) is this reachability map—all the destinations reachable by a single train (i.e., without a transfer) from a given station. [Sajjad Anwar]
Previously: A Map of India’s Railway Network.
The Ordnance Survey Maps Britain’s Favourite Routes
The Ordnance Survey has created a series of data visualizations showing the most popular walking and cycling routes, based on OS Maps usage. “The 500,000 plus routes were illustrated in a series of beautiful data visualisations by [cartographic designer] Charley [Glynn], who found it amazing that the people who created routes for their outdoors adventures had logged almost every bit of British coastline. It neatly frames the rest of the data and gives the illusion you are looking at a map of Great Britain. The darker, thicker areas illustrate the higher concentration of routes and reveal popularity.” Flickr gallery. [Mountain Bike Rider]
Average House Prices in the U.K.
British housing market analyst Neal Hudson posted a map of 2015 average house prices in the U.K. to Twitter last week. London is unsurprisingly dire.
It's been a while since I've published a map so here's 2015 house prices by postcode across Britain pic.twitter.com/p5AexvYokS
— Neal Hudson (@resi_analyst) April 14, 2016
Data Visualization’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ and Choropleth Maps
The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham compares two choropleth maps of U.S. population growth: while they look rather different, they use the same data. “The difference between my map and Pew’s—again, they both use the exact same data set—underscores a bit of a dirty little secret in data journalism: Visualizing data is as much an art as a science. And seemingly tiny design decisions—where to set a color threshold, how many thresholds to set, etc.—can radically alter how numbers are displayed and perceived by readers.” [Andy Woodruff]
(Worth mentioning that this is exactly the sort of thing dealt with in Mark Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps.)
People and Places
Coming next month from Policy Press, the third edition of People and Places: A 21st-Century Atlas of the U.K. by Danny Dorling and Bethan Thomas. The Independent has a long profile of the book, which makes extensive use of cartograms to illustrate data about the British population, and one of its co-authors, Oxford geography professor Danny Dorling. Pre-order at Amazon (direct Amazon U.K. link—it’s more likely to be in stock there). [via]
BatiParis: Mapping the Age of Paris’s Buildings
Project Ukko
Project Ukko visualizes seasonal wind predictions, i.e., the amount of wind that is forecasted for the upcoming season. It’s the sort of thing the wind generation industry would find useful. But such a prosaic purpose is belied by the breathtaking way in which the data is visualized. [via]
Le Grand Paris en Cartes
Le Grand Paris en Cartes is a collection of interactive maps and infographics about the Grand Paris Express, a multi-billion-euro project to extend Paris’s Metro and rapid transit network deep into the surrounding Île-de-France region (if you can read French, the official site and French Wikipedia page provide a lot more information). These maps not only illustrate Parisians’ commuting routes and Metro usage, but also (see above) the kind of sociological data that underpins transit planning: employment centres, population density and so forth. In French. [via]
The Best New York City Maps of 2015
Over on Metrocosm, Max Galka has assembled his pick of the 10 best New York City maps of 2015. The list includes maps of buildings, trees and languages, pathogens and crime, housing and “interestingness,” among others. [via]
Japanese Municipal Economy Map
An online map of Japanese municipalities that uses census data to measure their relative economic health. [via]
Mapping the Refugee Crisis
Here are two interactive maps that show the scale of recent refugee migrations. Lucify’s interactive map (screenshot above) shows the flow of asylum seekers to European countries since 2012. And this interactive map, compiled by The Conversation from UNHCR data, shows the size of refugee populations originating from or residing within each country from 1975 to 2010. In each case, the numbers grow with each passing year. More from Scientific American’s SA Visual blog. [via]